I bought a Playbook just before Christmas when the price dropped to Â£169 but have just bought an iPad to replace it. The PB hardware and OS are good, what killed it for me were the apps. There's no Kindle, Skype or Netflix, for example, and on the BB app store $1 = £1, so what apps there are felt pricey.

Nope... it's just the editor trolling for comments, for the story itself isn't that interesting. This has been happening a lot since Malda left. Apple has become a rather polarizing issue on slashdot so any article with even the slightest mention of Apple tends to draw a lot of people out of the woodwork to throw feces at each other. It must be great for ad revenue, but as a long time reader, I'm quite bored with it and find myself skipping over a lot Apple related discussion even though I'm an iOS dev.

These days I find myself more at Ars than I do here which is a shame since I used value the discussions here in such high regard. Oh well.

The RIM tablet doesn't really add anything over and above other 7" tablets that might run Android. Kindle Fire and Nook Color devices can be had for less. All of those really need work with third party firmware to be made legitimately worthwhile.

I own a whole bunch of tablets, including a (work-provided) ipad2 and several options from first-tier Android OEMs. In general, the best use I've found for them is consumption of ebooks, webcomics and product manuals. My favorite device is an 8.9" Samsung Galaxy, which has the 1280x800 screen resolution of a larger Android tablet but weighs about 2/3rds what the 1" larger ipad2 does. That's a lovely combination of form factor and usability.

I guess I could get away with doing the same things on my phone as I do with my tablets, but a 4.3" screen really doesn't have the same level of utility as a 7" or larger one.

And regarding your question, I'm sufficiently annoyed by all the drawbacks to iOS that I would never consider purchasing an Apple device for myself. Data sandboxing and format limitations drive me insane.